UN report says South Sudan has healed little since civil war

JOHANNESBURG - South Sudan has made no concrete steps toward national healing more than two years after the end of a civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people and sent more than 2 million people fleeing, a new United Nations report says.

Now some government forces are fueling new fighting by arming community militias with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns to attack neighbouring communities, says the report by the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, presented this week to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

It’s a bleak look at what the authors call “the government’s manifest lack of political will to end impunity for serious crimes.”

The “staggering scale” of sexual violence, as well as corruption and the use of starvation as a weapon of conflict, remain dangers in a country ranked as one of the worst in the world to live. More than half the population is hungry, and COVID-19 is spreading through a nation whose health system was largely shattered.

Instead of peacebuilding and accountability, “political violence is spiraling out of control at the inter-communal level but driven by national actors who arm ethnic militias and paramilitary groups with military-grade weapons using the ostensible cover of cattle-raiding, which in turn leads to reprisals and revenge killings – all under the cover and control of parties to the conflict in South Sudan,” the report says.

Government spokesman Michael Makuei rejected the report, asking, “Why should we mobilize militia against certain mentalities at the time when we have already signed a peace deal and we are all working for it?” He asserted of the authors: “All these are reports written by people who are seated comfortably in Juba hotels. They write such reports to guarantee their continuity“ in their posts.

In February, the country’s rival leaders formed a coalition government that many observers prayed would last this time around. But further steps toward peace have fallen behind, and the country remains awash in weapons despite a U.N. arms embargo that was extended in May for another year.